Penned in and feeling the squeeze

Luton didn't seem so far to go for dinner with an old friend: a 40-minute journey on Thameslink. But the ticket hall at Farringdon, close to the City, was already packed just before 5pm.

A notice, barely visible in the middle of the crowd, explained that power supply problems had led to the shutdown of cross-London services and there were no Thameslink trains from Farringdon in either direction.

Those of us trying to go north were advised to make our way by tube to Kentish Town and catch Thameslink from there. I pushed my way into an already overcrowded carriage on a train that was about to leave. Several attempts to close the doors ensued before we rattled off towards Kings Cross where I needed to change trains.

There, the volume of people being redirected to Kentish Town from the City was such that it was difficult to get on to the platform. It had taken me 50 minutes to get this far. It took another 15 minutes for a train to arrive that offered any hope of squeezing on.

Three stops later and I should have been at Kentish Town. As the doors were about to shut at the penultimate stop, an announcement was made over the intercom that Kentish Town was too crowded and the station was closed: no advice as to what we should do next, and no apology. The news was greeted mostly by rolling of eyes, sighs and looks of resignation. No one seemed angry. At 6.10 the station reopened.

Ten minutes later I was on the escalator at Kentish Town, heading at last for the Thameslink platform. But so was everyone else.

At the top of the escalator people were being pushed forward by the ever increasing numbers of people arriving from the bottom. Staff were shouting instructions for people to move forward, but there was nowhere to go. Another member of staff was holding people back from the Thameslink platform because that too was overcrowded. We were corralled in the ticket hall becoming more and more squashed.

At 6.30, more than one-and-a half hours after I had bought my ticket, I stepped on to a Thameslink train, found a tiny bit of standing room and breathed a sigh of relief as it pulled out.

I alighted at Luton at 7.07pm, more than two hours after I had set off.